Rash of Dubious Acts Prompts Talk of Ethics Reform by Legislature

The Joint Legislative Ethics Committee was following a tradition of inaction when it decided last week not to investigate whether Assemblywoman Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley) violated ethics rules by intervening with authorities on behalf of herself and her daughter for traffic offenses.

The decision came out of the committee’s first meeting in four years. Under the Legislature’s narrowly drawn Code of Ethics, the panel can only consider cases when a lawmaker’s action allegedly results in direct personal gain “which is in substantial conflict with the proper discharge of his duties in the public interest.”

The committee has no full-time staff and few resources. During its 23 years, it has dealt with only a handful of cases and has never recommended a substantive disciplinary action. Its rules appear to be written to be as exclusionary as possible, critics say.

“The legislative Ethics Committee has been a joke,” said Walter Zelman, executive director of California Common Cause, a citizens watchdog group. “It hasn’t done anything for years. It defines its purview extraordinarily narrowly.”

The committee’s days as the only ethics enforcer in the Capitol, however, may be numbered.

Secret Probe

The highly publicized revelation last August that the FBI has been conducting a secret probe of legislative corruption since 1985 prodded state lawmakers to take a major step beyond leaving it up to law enforcement agencies and voters to judge their behavior.

Since February, an Assembly Select Committee on Ethics has been grappling with a series of thorny questions:

Should those who write the laws be held to a higher standard than simply not breaking them? If so, what should those standards be? And, given lawmakers’ reluctance to sit in judgment of colleagues, who should enforce such rules of appropriate conduct?

Finally, amid widespread allegations of official wrongdoing and growing public mistrust, should laws governing elected representatives be toughened?

“There are conducts which currently don’t involve any law that we have, which I would deem inappropriate and not smart,” Assemblyman John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara), who chairs the Assembly ethics committee, said in an interview. “I think we’re short of standards of what’s appropriate behavior.”

In the San Fernando Valley alone, disclosures in the past 15 months have called into question standards of appropriate behavior:

Wright interceded with judges, police and the state Department of Motor Vehicles to seek special treatment for herself and her daughter on traffic offenses, according to Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury. His probe criticized the assemblywoman and various government agencies but found “no clear-cut criminal violations.”

Potential donors who received calls from campaign fund-raisers for Assemblyman Tom Bane (D-Tarzana) said they were pointedly advised that Bane chairs or sits on legislative policy committees that regulate their professions. Scientists seeking grants from a medical research board headed by Bane’s wife said they were also aggressively solicited.

Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Tarzana) lent more than $1 million in campaign funds to business associates involved in real estate deals, staffers and community organizations between 1984 and 1987. An investigation by Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp found Robbins had broken no state laws but said the loans spotlighted the need for clearer legal guidelines.

Citing an absence of criminal wrongdoing, the Valley lawmakers maintained that they had done nothing wrong. But the question remains: Should such actions be permitted?

Vasconcellos’ committee is grappling with such sensitive issues. The eight-member panel is expected to recommend changes in laws, new rules and adoption of an ethics education program for legislators and an internal or external enforcement mechanism, members said.

“The biggest hurdle is drafting something substantive, practical and adoptable; something that serves both to address the concerns of the public and does not curtail the appropriate actions of legislators,” Vasconcellos said two days before the committee held its third of four public hearings last week.

Further Limit Possible

Among the possible proposals is a further limit or a ban on much-criticized speaking payments from special-interest groups. California legislators augmented their income with $1,441,096 in such honorariums during the 1987-88 legislative session. State Sen. Ed Davis (R-Valencia), one of the few lawmakers who does not accept such fees, calls them “thinly disguised bribery.”

Vasconcellos’ committee may also support more stringent restriction on the personal use of campaign funds. Van de Kamp is advocating this reform in a bill prompted by the Robbins inquiry.

The proposal is expected to call for banning loans of campaign funds except to charitable, religious and educational groups and to require that any expenditure that creates a substantial personal benefit be primarily for a political, governmental or legislative purpose, Fred Woocher, Van de Kamp’s special counsel, said Friday.

If the select ethics committee adopts a tough program--as Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), one its eight members, predicts it will--it still must steer it through an Assembly loath to give up its prerogatives or invite increased oversight. Some veteran observers say this will only happen if public interest and media pressure are intense.

“They will pass as little regulation as they feel is socially acceptable,” predicted Michael Josephson, a former law professor and founding president of the nonprofit Joseph and Edna Josephson Institute for the Advancement of Ethics, in Marina del Rey.

Lawmakers’ reluctance to judge colleagues is reflected in the Joint Legislative Ethics Committee. The committee considered the Wright matter Thursday at Dist. Atty. Bradbury’s behest. Acting on the advice of the legislative counsel, it decided that Wright’s contacts with authorities on her daughter’s behalf did not fall under the committee’s narrowly drawn jurisdiction.

State Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside), the Ethics Committee’s vice chairman, expressed what appears to be widespread sentiment, saying, “Probably the law ought to be broadened.”

Ethics experts note that the increased concern with standards of proper conduct is hardly unique to the California Legislature. In fact, ethics seems to be the pervasive issue of the late 1980s.

Consider ex-U.S. Sen. Gary Hart’s personal indiscretions; the conviction of Wall Street stock speculator Ivan Boesky and indictment of “junk bond” king Michael Milken; the transgressions of television evangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker; the conviction of numerous ex-officials of former President Reagan’s administration and the Iran-Contra arms deal.

Most recently, of course, headlines have been rife with the House Ethics Committee’s charges that House Speaker Jim Wright violated House rules to enrich himself. And, closer to home, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley faces numerous investigations for alleged conflicts of interest.

“The whole ethical climate in the country is changing,” said Robert M. Stern, former general counsel to the state Fair Political Practices Commission and author of an article titled “Ethics in the States.”

Stern is an advocate of legislative reform. But he nonetheless wrote:

“Our legislatures are a mirror of our citizens, and their ethics are probably far superior to the ethics of the average businessman, labor leader or pillar of the community. How many citizens can be audited by the Internal Revenue Service and not owe any money? How many of our citizens would turn down money in exchange for a favor (a vote)?”

And reforms have been enacted. The voter-approved 1974 Political Reform Act, which Stern helped craft, prohibits a public official from participating in or using his position to try to influence any governmental decision in which he “knows or has reason to know he has a financial interest.”

The act established the Fair Political Practices Commission to oversee the law but exempted lawmakers from prosecution on conflict-of-interest charges.

The act also requires each legislator and candidate for office to file periodic statements of economic interests, disclosing investments, interests in property and income of themselves and their immediate family. Public disclosure is generally viewed as a deterrent to abuse.

Proposition 73, adopted by voters last June, limits campaign contributions from individuals, political action committees and political parties, and bars officeholders from accepting honorariums exceeding $1,000 from a single source in a year.

Brighter Spotlight

Still, the growing sums of campaign contributions, gifts, trips and speaking fees showered on state legislators by PACs have brought an outcry from public-interest watchdogs such as Common Cause and the media. Disclosure of the FBI sting operation--which this month resulted in the indictment of Sen. Joseph B. Montoya (D-Whittier) on racketeering, extortion and money-laundering charges--gave the issue greater urgency.

“The system doesn’t really do too much to encourage its members to do the right thing,” said Daniel Lowenstein, a UCLA professor and former chairman of the FPPC who advocates changes including a vigorous ethics committee and further campaign finance reform.

Josephson, who runs ethics programs for politicians, journalists and business people and publishes a magazine on ethics, offers this yardstick for measuring an official’s integrity:

“Has he or she done anything to affect his or her ability to exercise independent judgment” or create the appearance that his or her autonomy has been compromised?

He maintains: “Simply because it’s permissible doesn’t make it proper.”

Josephson said this applied to actions allegedly taken by Cathie Wright, Bane and Robbins.

Although Dist. Atty. Bradbury found that Wright had committed “no clear-cut criminal violation,” Josephson called her reported efforts to help her daughter avoid penalties for traffic violations “a classic case of the use of influence in the most tempting of circumstances. People view loyalty to their family as above all else.”

He continued: “If, in fact, she would have done that for any constituent, she has misunderstood her obligation as a legislator. Our system doesn’t call for the legislator to interfere with other government agencies carrying out their duties. It’s like putting your fingers on the scales of justice.”

Reported efforts by Bane’s solicitors to raise campaign funds by pointedly telling prospective donors that the assemblyman is in a position to influence their interests, if true, “are extortionate and coercive,” Josephson said.

“All giving ought to be free and voluntary. Any time there is an implicit or direct threat, it takes away from the voluntary-ness, and makes it a payoff. He benefits from the illusion that they’re at least protecting themselves” by contributing to his campaign.

Further, Josephson said, “Whatever powers the legislator has, we’re all entitled to them. I don’t have to give him a nickel. In fact, I can oppose him to the hilt, and I should still be entitled to his representation.”

Campaign Funds Defined

Robbins’ use of campaign funds as loans to business associates--a practice that the senator no longer engages in--was wrong because “it’s using funds supposedly designated for a narrower use for a personal use,” Josephson said. “Campaign funds are meant for campaigning.”

Moreover, he said, using the money for non-campaign purposes encourages lawmakers to raise ever larger amounts from special interests, “which expands the field of indebtedness and the potential for abuse.”

Given the Legislature’s reluctance to delve into the touchy realm of moral self-regulation, Josephson, Lowenstein and Stern all said vigilance by the media is a deterrent to ethics abuse. And, in the end, the voters periodically pass judgment on their lawmakers. Scandal has been the undoing of most of the small number of California state or federal lawmakers who have been defeated in recent years.

In any case, state Sen. Davis says things have improved since his first eye-opening visit to Sacramento in 1953 as a Los Angeles police representative. He recalled that a veteran lobbyist confided the initiation rite that the lobbyist and a colleague employed with rookie legislators.

The lawmaker would be taken to an out-of-the-way road house and asked, “Will you play ball with us?”

If the official responded affirmatively, he was instructed to reach under the table, grab a wad of bills from the lobbyists’ plain black bag and discreetly pocket the payola.

“Someday,” the lobbyists advised, “we’ll come back to you, ask for a favor, and give you another grab.”